1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system for administering a survey or questionnaire to a sample of users of a computer network and, more particularly, a system for administering a survey for Internet Web site visitors.
2. Description of the Related Technology
The popularity of personal computers has exploded in the past decade. Each year more and more people have used more and more personal computers in more and more ways. This rapid expansion in computer use has resulted in the formation of on-line market places with products and services being advertised over networks such as the Internet and on networked computers of the World Wide Web. Such computers are known as Web sites. All types of products and services are marketed, promoted and/or sold, including motion pictures, television shows and automobiles. These Web sites not only have pictures and text, but may also include audio or video information available to the user or "surfer."
World Wide Web sites are built for many different objectives, including advertising products and services to consumers, selling products and services directly to consumers and distributing corporate and government information. In order to maximize the effectiveness of these sites, the producers try to make their sites interactive, interesting, educational, entertaining, etc. One of the methods to gauge the effectiveness of these factors is to survey the visitors to these sites.
Each site on the World Wide Web is a construction of many different "pages," each written in HTML (hypertext markup language). The HTML page contains the text and formatting information for the page. An HTML document will typically have references to the location of graphic images rather than include the images directly in the document itself. The most common image format is known as GIF (graphics image format). When "visiting" a Web page or site, the consumer's or user's Web browser requests and fetches the HTML document from the Web. The browser recognizes the references to images and then retrieves the images. The browser then paints the screen with the images and text according to the formatting information.
Web site producers are very interested in the consumers that visit their Web sites. Some sites already use a survey mechanism, wherein a questionnaire is written into a Web page and some consumers choose to provide the requested information. This is only a "convenience" sample. The responding visitors are not representative of all the visitors to the site. Thus, this method is not practical for serious information gathering. Achieving a statistically significant sample, minimizing the self-selection bias, is a problem in surveying a Web population.